


Seasoning the Termless Feast of Our Content

by Skeiler



Category: History Boys (2006)
Genre: Et in arcadia ego, Implied Slash, M/M, Oxford, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-10
Updated: 2013-12-10
Packaged: 2018-01-04 05:53:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1077328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skeiler/pseuds/Skeiler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Posner unexpectedly meets Irwin while attending a conference in Oxford. Thus ensues reflections on times past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seasoning the Termless Feast of Our Content

**Author's Note:**

  * For [edna_blackadder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/edna_blackadder/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I tried to write Posner in a way consistent with the ending of the movie—not happy, but not unhappy about it, and with a greater understanding and contentment with himself. I really hope you enjoy this!

It was a beautiful English summer morning. David Posner watched the rolling Oxfordshire countryside slip by from the window of an early morning train, and even though it wasn’t yet eight o’clock, the sun was up and lightly touching everything with its long golden fingers.

_Calm was the day, and through the trembling air_   
_Sweet breathing Zephyrus did softly play,_   
_A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay_   
_Hot Titan's beams, which then did glister fair._ 1

The poem filtered through his mind, unbidden. Even after all these years he still found poetry coming to him out of some deep, dark wellspring in a corner of his mind. This was the legacy that Hector had left him, this mercurial power of always having something soul-achingly beautiful to say, the words borrowed from another, memorized out of his well-worn copy of _The Oxford Book of English Verse._ What was it Hector had said, that last year before the exams? ‘Learn it now, know it now and you’ll understand it whenever. And then you will have the antidote ready. Grief: happiness. Even when you’re dying.’ Posner smiled at the memory.

As the train passed Port Meadow and Posner stared out across it, another gobbet—as his other teacher from that last year at school had called them—bubbled up in his mind.

_O wide wan waste of waters, where no breath_  
 _Ruffles the mirror surface, but the gray_  
 _Of clouds above is real as if the day_  
 _Were no less gloomy to a world beneath!_ 2

The train turned slightly and began to slow before passing into the station. Oxford. It had been several years since Posner had last been in Oxford—he hadn’t had much call to for the past, oh, ten years or so. Not since Dakin had finished and moved on, to London and the law and material riches. The station hadn’t changed, though—like most English country train stations, it watched the passage of thousands through its stalls and along its worn old platforms without ever really aging. Posner stepped down from the carriage and, over the train’s sighing engines and the hubbub of the station, listened for the sound of Oxford’s bells. That had always been his favourite thing about that time of his life—the sound of the bells as he woke in the morning, the sense that somewhere in a very similar room in a very similar place, Dakin was hearing the same thing.

Posner smiled to himself again and shook his head. Ten years and he still thought of Dakin every time he thought of his uni years, of his school years. He’d expected this, of course—as soon as he’d signed on for this teachers conference at Corpus Christi College, he’d known that the simple experience of walking the Oxford streets again would bring back a hundred unsought memories of years gone by.

_Memories are a house._  
 _Time is a roof. All the time a roof. All the time time._  
 _I would like sometime to die_  
 _unto them and see them._ 3

The walk to Corpus Christi College took him to the very heart of the city, past colleges he didn’t quite remember the names of (what was that one, across from the Union? St. Peter’s? Or St. Anne’s?) and down streets he didn’t quite recognize because all the shops were different now. He’d been to Corpus once, on the night of its junior common room Christmas party, when all the undergraduates had lined the small, medieval quad around one in the morning amidst a thickening fall of snow and done the hokey-cokey. One boy had stripped and done laps around the Pelican sundial. He’d gone there with Dakin, who had a friend at Corpus and wanted to see the annual shenanigans. Half-lost in reverie, Posner walked quickly down Queen Street and into the High, his mind’s eye seeing figments of times past, the happy memories of summer-gilded days when he’d take the bus from Cambridge to spend the weekend with Dakin.

_I wander first down Cranham Street_  
 _To where Canal Street still may go,_  
 _And mark, in ever face I meet,_  
 _Marks of change in Jericho._  
  
 _True, the place and I are older;_  
 _But, a poet-pilgrim, I_  
 _Come to many such sites bolder_  
 _And not proud to wonder why._ 4

Posner made it to Corpus easily enough, in plenty of time for the conference’s first speech. He was there on behalf of his school’s master, who’d been injured a few days before in a hiking accident and had asked Posner to go along in his place to this conference on getting comprehensive school students into Oxford. Posner hadn’t offered up the fact that he could probably teach their students more about the much-lauded and somewhat fallacious ‘secrets’ about Oxbridge admissions than any conference—it meant a day and a night in Oxford at no expense to him. He wasn’t even entirely sure what the program for the day was going to be—the headmaster had called and asked him to go, but hadn’t sent along the packet with the day’s program.

And so Posner found himself standing in the doorway at Corpus and looking through the tunnel of the porter’s lodge as if looking back in time at a dozen earlier versions of himself and his friends, when a not unfamiliar voice surprised him and said, ‘Well, hello there.’

Posner turned and found himself looking into the face of Tom Irwin. ‘Hello, sir,’ Posner returned, falling back on the formality that had been suitable when Irwin had been Posner’s teacher, but was perhaps, not so appropriate now that were something like colleagues, if not equals. He put his hand out. ‘What are you doing here? Are you teaching again?’

Irwin laughed and shook his hand, ‘No, I’m the first speaker. Nothing like a ‘celebrity’ of sorts to open the proceedings. I’m talking about the perception of the application process in comprehensive schools.’

Posner nodded, unsure of what else to say. ‘I enjoyed your last program. Stalin. Very provocative.’

A jumble of newly arrived attendees pushed them apart momentarily, and Posner found himself smiling sheepishly at Irwin in the gaps between the passing crowd. It was surreal, seeing him here. Surreal—and nice. It had been in Oxford the last time they’d met, when Irwin was doing research for one of his first television programs. Posner had spoken with him briefly outside the Bodleian, the two exchanging sympathies about the hurdles one had to jump, moving from reading room to reading room to find the half-dozen or so books scattered across them that one needed to read. Posner had watched his every movement greedily, jealously—wondering all the while if he was going to see Dakin while he was in town. Irwin looked older now. His hair was greying slightly and he’d put on a little weight. He walked without the cane or limp he’d had the last time Posner had seen him.

When the crowd had passed, Posner found himself standing awkwardly next to Irwin again in the college’s porch, unsure of what to say and fighting some impulse in himself to revert to the small teenage boy Irwin had known. ‘Well.’

‘Would you like to have a drink? Tonight? Catch up?’ Irwin asked. Posner looked at him, surprised. ‘After the conference.’

‘Yes, alright,’ Posner agreed.

‘I’d best be getting in. I’m sure they’ll all want to shake my hand and take pictures,’ Irwin gestured absent-mindedly toward the Corpus hall. ‘Come find me at the Randolph.’

‘Yes, right,’ Posner said. ‘See you later.’

They parted ways.

The conference was a long slog. It had been just over ten years since he’d left Oxford, and yet Posner sat through the sessions and mock interviews and roundtables and marveled at how little the advice had changed from Irwin’s that last year at school. Don’t just be smart—don’t just know poetry, don’t just know art, don’t just know calculus or physics or Latin or history. Don’t just be good at sports. Do whatever you need to do to stand out from the crowd. Have an unpopular opinion, but be able to defend it. Have confidence. Have luck. Have money. Be winsome. Be polished. Be something you aren’t, but don’t _try_ to be something you aren’t. Be yourself, but don’t be surprised if we don’t like you.

_Have a bloody good mentor,_ Posner thought with a wry smile as he left the college’s front gate. A group of teachers from the Birmingham area that he had met at a previous conference had invited him to dinner, but Posner had demurred. He’d rather explore that fleeting flush, the butterflies that had fluttered in his stomach earlier on seeing Irwin again. Though he didn’t tell them that. His feet carried him swiftly to the Randolph, his heart in his throat like a giddy schoolboy. Rather than take King Edward Street to the High, he cut along Blue Boar Street and by Rudge’s college, Christ Church. He passed through the crowded bus stands along St. Aldate’s and back up along Cornmarket and, finally, along the final stretch to the Randolph.

He found Irwin sitting in the Randolph Bar, sipping a gin and tonic and reading a magazine—the _Times Literary Supplement_ , it turned out when Irwin closed it and put it down on the small table next to his elbow when Posner walked over and sat down with him.

‘How was the rest of the conference?’ Irwin asked, a slightly mischievous look on his face.

‘You didn’t miss much after you slipped away,’ Posner replied. After his talk, Irwin had gone to sit in the back. But it hadn’t been long before he’d heard Irwin telling someone that he just had to use the toilet, from which errand he’d never returned. Irwin feigns surprise. ‘Don’t think I didn’t notice.’

‘Ah well,’ Irwin smiled. ‘I wanted to take the chance to do a little research in the Bodleian. While I’m in town. How are you, Posner?’

Posner shifted slightly uneasily in his seat, aware of the way Irwin was watching him. He seemed to have a heightened sense of his own as yet entirely undiscarded teenage awkwardness. One was supposed to grow out of such things, but Posner had never stopped feeling like that young man who had once sat across from Irwin and made such a heartfelt confession.

‘I’m alright,’ he finally replied. A waiter approached and he ordered a gin and tonic, which was the only drink he could think of under the circumstances.

‘Do you see much of Dakin?’ Irwin asked, seemingly utterly innocently.

‘No,’ Posner replied, quietly. He hadn’t seen Dakin in almost ten years. He kept up with him, from a distance, living as he did in the same quiet corner of Sheffield that he’d grown up in and prone, therefore, to occasionally seeing Mrs. Dakin around town.

‘No, me either,’ Irwin replied. The both looked at their drinks. ‘Do you miss him?’

‘Yes, sometimes,’ Posner replied. ‘But not badly. I think I miss that time of my life, rather than him so much. I miss the _idea_ of him. I sometimes think of going to London and trying to run into him. “Perchance we may, / Where now this night is day, / And even through faith of still averted feet, / Making full circle of our banishment, / Amazèd meet.” 5 But I never do. I think I’d be very disappointed to see him now. I much prefer to remember him as was.’

Irwin laughed. ‘Still full of poetry, I see. You took Hector’s lessons to heart more than the other boys.’

‘I find it reassuring,’ Posner replied, stung. He wasn’t sure if Irwin had meant that to sound as patronizing as it did. ‘To always know that someone, somewhere experienced the same feeling and wrote about it. That’s what it was always about—understanding that the things we felt were universal, rather than unique. Even if we couldn’t imagine that at the time. “The magic of the quiet hours, / Breathe unheard of tales of other times / And other destinies than ours; / The feet that long ago walked here / Still, noiseless, walk beside our feet, / Poor ghosts, who found the garden dear, / And found the morning sweet!”6’

‘Hector thought I was a terrible philistine for ruining the purity of your education,’ Irwin pointed out. ‘But I suppose, in a way, I was jealous. I’ve never had much of a head for memorizing poetry. Just facts and figures. They have to have enormous amounts of cue cards on my sets because I forget my lines.’

Posner laughed, easily and with uncommon loudness. He suddenly found that he was far less afraid of Irwin. Knowing that in some small way Irwin had been jealous of _him_ over something that Posner had never seen as any great feat of strength, gave him an incredible burst of confidence. He felt himself relax a little bit, sinking back into his chair.

‘It helped a lot, you know,’ Posner confided. ‘The poetry. Whenever I found myself feeling sad because… because I was lonely or felt out of place. It really helped to know that I wasn’t alone. It helped me get through some very rough times.’

Irwin smiled at Posner, a warm smile that made his heart flutter. ‘You seem much happier than you did back then.’

‘I think I’ve just stopped caring,’ Posner laughed.

‘You told me once that you wanted to get into Cambridge because you thought it might make Dakin love you,’ Irwin said. ‘Or make you stop caring. Was it everything you wanted it to be?’

Posner considered this for a moment. A second gin and tonic had replaced the first, that he’d somehow finished without paying attention. When Posner reached out to pick up the glass, his hand brushed briefly against Irwin’s. Posner was suddenly aware that they were sitting very close together, and that neither of them drew their hands back in embarrassment at the accidental touch. ‘I don’t know. Some days I think it was. Some days I think it wasn’t. Some days I was very clever and my tutors said very nice things about me. And some days I just felt this crushing sense of not being good enough—in many ways it was very hard for me to keep up with the others in my tutorials. I lost confidence in my ability to think. And now I’ve felt so _conflicted_ about it for so long, I don’t think I can ever feel _un_ conflicted. I was terribly depressed, at the end. “Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, / Into the living sea of waking dream, / Where there is neither sense of life, nor joys, / But the huge shipwreck of my own esteem / And all that’s dear.”7 I thought it was such a mistake. But it did change me—I think for the better.’

‘How do you mean?’ Irwin asked, quietly. His face was full of concern, the teacherly sympathy coming through just as it had when Posner had been at school.

‘I sound so grim, don’t I! I don’t mean to. I barely think about all the evenings I spent being miserable about Dakin,’ Posner replied. ‘I think about _Brideshead Revisited_.’

Irwin laughed. ‘The miniseries?’

‘Yes, and the book. I read it after the series was on TV, and then I reread it the summer before I went up to Cambridge. It’s what I expected to find, in a way—the low door in the wall. _Et in arcadia ego._ All things wonderful about youth and privilege and love that seem to gild people from better backgrounds than mine from birth, all suddenly opened up for a poor young boy from Sheffield. And in many respects it was like _Brideshead Revisited_. There was… a boy there. We were very close. After Dakin.’

‘Posner, you sly thing,’ Irwin said, with a knowing smile.

‘It was all so glamorous, and I felt glamorous sometimes. Like I had transcended to another level of existence, on the good days. I grew up hearing Oxford and Cambridge spoken of like Earthly Paradises that transformed you through magic into some polished new person, capable of really being _somebody_ and with no limits on what you could do. You’ve no idea how disappointed I was that matriculation didn’t give me sudden fluency in Latin.’

They both laughed. Posner took another drink and let himself smile unworriedly before shrugging and summing up, ‘Obviously Cambridge didn’t magically make me successful. I couldn’t see, for a long time, how Cambridge had changed me. But it did. I may not be living in London making a million pounds a year, but I _like_ my life. I’m not happy, not the material way people think you’re supposed to be… but I’m not _un_ happy. I am content. I don’t know that I’d change anything about my life. Maybe that _is_ happiness.’

‘It’s certainly wisdom,’ Irwin said, his eyes locked onto Posner’s. Neither blinked or looked away for a long moment, until a passing waiter broke their concentrated regard of one another. Irwin changed the direction of their conversation, ‘Do you teach your students like Hector taught you? Poetry, French, songs, and classic movie endings?’

‘Some of them,’ Posner said as he took another sip of his drink. He could feel the gin swirling around his insides, making him feel very cozy and slightly amorous. It made him unafraid to be honest with Irwin, or to look him directly in the eyes. ‘Though not _entirely_ quite like Hector did. To the others, anyway. Some of my students are very bright, and they come to me and want to talk about poetry. Some of them think I’m just odd. But every year the ones who leave cobble together to buy me a book—I have more copies of the collected works of John Betjeman than I know what to do with! Sometimes it’s a lonely life, but not always. And I have had more students go to Oxford and Cambridge than Hector ever did.’

They both laughed, a little too loudly, perhaps. They ordered another round of drinks and pulled their chairs closer together and reminisced about the old days until the bartender politely ushered them out of the bar. They stood in the old hotel’s foyer, smiling at each other, at ease with their sudden intimacy. And when Irwin asked Posner if he wanted to go upstairs to Irwin’s room, Posner did. A final line of poetry caught on his lips as Irwin took his hand and they walked up the stairs together:

_I loved and guessed at you, you construed me  
And loved me for what might or might not be. 8_

_______________________________________________

 

1- Edmund Spenser, “Prothalamion”

2- Francis William Bourdillon, “Port Meadow, Oxford”

3- Avot Yeshurun, “Memories Are a House”

4- Jonathan Price, “Sir John Revisits Jericho”

5- Coventry Patmore, “A Farewell”

6- Edith Nesbit, “New College Gardens, Oxford”

7- John Clare, “Written in Northampton County Asylum”

8- Christina Rossetti, “I loved you first: but afterwards your love”


End file.
